Warning: This post contains potential spoilers for The Walking Dead. Read at your own risk! 

Season seven of The Walking Dead was an intense one. With the introduction of the biggest of Big Bads (Bigs Bad?) the show has seen so far, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the fandom was faced with an enemy unlike any it had seen before. Negan brought a huge amount of power to The Walking Dead universe, and with that power came a staggering amount of cruelty and brutality. That brutality cost us some of our most well-loved characters like [Spoilers] Sasha, Abraham, and Glenn.

Negan brought a lot to the show, and arguably breathed new life into it. While it’s exciting to see the comic’s “All Out War” storyline finally come to fruition, it was pretty unclear how long this war with Negan would last. After all, some villains stick around for what seemed like a LONG time, like the Governor; others, like Terminus, get wiped out in an episode.

Well, it looks like we have our answer. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Scott Gimple explained that, “The war will absolutely be resolved by the end of season eight. Absolutely.” So there you have it. It makes sense that the war definitively ends in the coming season. After all, if you’ve read the comics, you’ll know the time jump that introduces “Old Man Rick,” who we got a glimpse of in the season 8 trailer, is post-war (and hopefully post Negan getting the comeuppance Rick promised him).

Of course, we don’t know how the show is going to handle the war and the time jump–or when it will happen in season eight. EW reported Rick Grimes himself, Andrew Lincoln, being pretty dodgey about the whole “old man Rick” situation and the show’s timeline, saying “I mean, it’s a gray Rick. It’s an older Rick. So by virtue of the fact that you see, that means that it’s in the future.”

So while we know the war will end in season eight, we don’t know if it will be earlier or later in the season. Additionally, once the war is over, when will we meet our newest villains? Canonically, The Whisperers would be the next villains Rick’s group would meet, but Gimple offered no comment on whether or not we’d see The Whisperers and their leader, Alpha, in season eight. We’ll just have to wait for The Walking Dead to return to AMC on October 22 to see how Rick and his group handles the war and whatever comes next.

Are you happy the “All Out War” storyline will be resolved this season? Do you think it will take the entire season, or will be it be ressolved earlier on? Tell us your season 8 theories in the comments!

Feature Image: AMC

Gif credit: Giphy, Giphy, Giphy

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